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Should had paid for cybersecurity or not pay misery bug bounties. Attract talent to the blue team!
[0]https://www.insidepandc.com/article/28is3dljuei18ioo7fri8/ax...
Paying ransom should be illegal. Ransom funds illegal activities. Not indirectly, like buying coffee or poppyseed or whatever, but literally money that is directly reinvested in criminal activity- like ransomware.
> Once they received the payment, the hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said. I thought the protocol for these attacks was to send the decryption keys, not provide a "decrypting tool." If some kind of softwa…
Paying ransom should be illegal. Ransom funds illegal activities. Not indirectly, like buying coffee or poppyseed or whatever, but literally money that is directly reinvested in criminal activity- like ransomware.
I understand the sentiment, but you'd end up re-victimizing the victim. Someone who felt like they had no choice but to pay could later be prosecuted, while the the actual criminal walks free in anonymity.
> Once they received the payment, the hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said. I thought the protocol for these attacks was to send the decryption keys, not provide a "decrypting tool." If some kind of softwa…
Consider that most victims are small fry who would not know what to do with just a key.
I am definitely not an expert in these areas and I'm sure someone 100x smarter than I am has thought of this and discounted it already, but is there any ability to decompile the executable provided to Colonial and get to patterns of source code, then compel github to search their repositories for any patterns of that code? Not sure if that is even legal or whether a judge would authorize that fishing expedition, but…
Assuming we're talking private repos, compelling Github to do that is a pretty blatant fourth amendment violation unless there's a specific set of suspected repos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand the sentiment, but you'd end up re-victimizing the victim. Someone who felt like they had no choice but to pay could later be prosecuted, while the the actual criminal walks free in anonymity.
Here we have a coordination problem, like the prisoner’s dilemma. People who pay ransom are the defectors, improving their situation at the cost of making the problem much worse for everyone. If fewer people paid ransom, ransomware would be less profitable and would happen less often and we’d all be better off. The government can help coordination by making defecting more costly (with criminal penalties).
not just sticks, but also carrots: The federal government should commit to doing all it can to help organizations that refuse to pay ransoms. This would include help from 3-letter agencies as well as bringing in alternative IT infrastructure. Obviously the federal government doesn't have all of these capabilities now, but this should be a priority going forward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So let people who aren’t experts at physical security suffer break-ins, and physically weak people get beaten up? We have law enforcement so everyone can be free to focus on their own value-add in life without having to learn 1000 skills to cover their own ass. I love security but 99% of people don’t, and shouldn’t
That's a non sequitur. Certainly law enforcement should aggressively pursue criminals who engage in assault, burglary, and extortion. But that has nothing to do with paying off ransomware gangs.
Paying ransom should be illegal. Ransom funds illegal activities. Not indirectly, like buying coffee or poppyseed or whatever, but literally money that is directly reinvested in criminal activity- like ransomware.